… but not the ‘Painted Ladies’

Hoodline: Meet Dr. Color: How Bob Buckter Repainted San Francisco. His website is DrColor.com.

“Quick: imagine a colorful San Francisco Victorian. The way it looks in your mind’s eye probably has something to do with Buckter’s decades of steady influence.
[…]
One vista he hasn’t directly touched is the famed “postcard row” of painted ladies on Alamo Square. He’s done other historic work on the park, but not on that uniquely iconic stretch of Steiner St. They are “a bit understated for my taste,” he says.”

Link via MetaFilter.

“Ich habe eine 113 gewürfelt…”

The New Yorker: The Dice You Never Knew You Needed.

“[T]wo scientists from the Dice Lab, Robert Fathauer and Henry Segerman, débuted their newest specimen, fresh from the petri dish. They had invented – or, rather, discovered; no, really they’d just inexplicably gone to the trouble of creating – a die with a hundred and twenty sides. “What do you use it for?“ Fathauer asked the audience. “We have no idea,“ he answered. Futility notwithstanding, the d120 is billed as the “ultimate fair die allowed by Mother Nature (i.e., mathematics!),“ since a die couldn’t, practically speaking, possess more sides or more symmetry, and dice must be symmetrical to be fair.”

Watch the d120 in action on YouTube.

You can susbstitute the d120 for any dn in which n is a proper factor of 120; here’s a handy chart for this use.

Even though I don’t play any games that require more than a d6 or two and even though already own a d8, d12, d24, d30 (alphabet with 4 wildcards) and a d100 that I almost never use, I somehow feel like I need to also have a d120.

Links via MetaFilter: Or, disdyakis triacontahedron.

Chernobyl – Tschernobyl

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl.

McClatchy DC: Ruined Chernobyl nuclear plant will remain a threat for 3,000 years. “30 years since Chernobyl may seem like a long time, but it’s really just the start. Below reactor’s ruins is a 2,000-ton radioactive mass that can’t be removed. How do you protect a site for as long a time as Western civilization has existed?”

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty: The Chernobyl Disaster: How It Happened. “On April 26, 1986, a routine safety test at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine spiraled out of control. Follow the dramatic events that led to the world’s worst civilian nuclear disaster.”

Links via the 30th anniversary commemoration thread on MetaFilter, which contains more excellent links and interesting discussion, as usual: “This was the day, of course, when we learned we were wrong.“

I posted about Chernobyl on my weblog several times in the past: April 26, 2006, 20th anniversary; May 2, 2006, Artikel aus der Zeit; May 28, 2007; April 26, 2010; November 18, 2010.